"Ahriman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... disappear. Night after night they wage this combat. What gods they are who fight endlessly and indecisively over New York is not for our knowledge; whether it be Thor and Odin, or Zeus and Cronos, or Michael and Lucifer, or Ormuzd and Ahriman, or Good-as-a-means and Good-as-an-end. The ways of our lords were ever riddling and obscure. To the right a celestial bottle, stretching from the horizon to the zenith, appears, is uncorked, and scatters the worlds with the foam of what ambrosial liquor may have been within. Beyond, a Spanish ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... AHRIMAN (Gr. 'Areimanios in Aristotle, or in Agathias; in the Avesta, Angro Mainyush—"the Destructive Spirit''), the name of the principle of evil in the dualistic doctrine of Zoroaster. The name does not occur in the Old Persian inscriptions. In ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... created the world out of water. But others say that the supreme spirit is the sun (Le Jeune, Relation, 1633). The Algonquins, besides a belief in a good spirit (manitou), had also a belief in a malignant manitou, in whom the missionaries recognized the devil (why not Ormuzd and Ahriman?). One tribe invokes the 'Maker of Heaven,' the 'god of waters,' and also the 'seven spirits of the wind' (so, too, seven is a holy number ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... perfectum bonum est in hoc mundo, et quod est, valde est exiguum. This speculation is clearly a development of that which the Iranian cosmology has to tell about the battles between Ahura-Mazda and Angro-Mainyu (Ormuzd and Ahriman). The Iranian optimism has been replaced here by a strong pessimism. This material world is no longer, as in Zoroastrianism, essentially a creation of the good God, but the powers of evil have created it with the aid of some stolen portions of light. This ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... Avesta. The doctrines taught are likewise purer and more rational. Note the following:—I. There is one supreme good deity, Ahura-Mazda, the conception of whom is so lofty that, in order to save his character, a spirit of evil (Ahriman) has been invented. To the supreme good spirit are ascribed six attributes which are often personified. In the later parts of the Avesta these attributes are made independent persons (the bountiful immortals, or the Amesha Spentas). But in the Gathas they form with Ahura-Mazda a unity ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... the favor of powerful princes, extended his reform throughout the country, and founded a new religion on the ancient worship. According to this religion the two great principles of the world were represented by Ormuzd and Ahriman, both born from eternity, and both contending for the dominion of the world. Ormuzd, the principle of good, is represented by light, and Ahriman, the principle of evil, by darkness. Light, then, being the body or symbol of Ormuzd, is worshiped in the sun and stars, in ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... able to distinguish good and evil, light and darkness, Ormuzd and Ahriman. And you would have lived in the hope that light will eventually conquer; and that all discordances will be reconciled ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... nights and does not depart for the other world until the dawn after the third night. Then the righteous go to heaven and the wicked to hell. There the wicked remain until the time of renovation of the universe, that is, the judgment day. After the renovation, when Ahriman or Satan is killed, the souls of the wicked will be purified and have everlasting progress. [Footnote: "Sacred Books of the East," Vol. xvii, pp. 27, 34, 46.] The question was asked, "How shall they produce resurrection?" Ahura ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... by the author of the De Iside, which was extracted from the plant Omomi, and which the Magi offered to the god of the underworld, is certainly the haoma. The rite mentioned by the Greek author, which appears to be an incantation against Ahriman, required, it seems, a potion in which the blood of a wolf was a necessary ingredient: this questionable draught was then carried to a place where the sun's rays never shone, and was there sprinkled on ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... at the lowest end of the scale was reached the Demiurgus or Jehovah of the Old Testament, who created the world and appeared, clothed in material form, to the patriarchs. According to some of the Gnostics this lowest aeon or emanation was identical with the Jewish Satan, or the Ahriman of the Persians, who is called "the prince of this world," and the creation of the world was an essentially evil act. But all did not share in these extreme opinions. In the prevailing, theory, this last of the divine emanations was identified with the ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... the existence of two worlds, one good and one bad; the latter created by the evil power for the purpose of damaging the former. The existing cosmos is a mere mixture of the two, and the "last judgment" is a root-and-branch extirpation of the work of Ahriman. ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... what the battle of life meant than that, when they said that not only the man who did a merciful or just deed, but the man who drained a swamp, tilled a field, made any little corner of the earth somewhat better than he found it, was fighting against Ahriman the evil spirit of darkness, on the side of Ormuzd the good god of light; and that as he had taken his part in Ormuzd's battle, he should ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... incarnation of all that thwarts its free development. Thus counterposed, the two chief actors represent the fundamental antitheses of good and evil, liberty and despotism, love and hate. They give the form of personality to Shelley's Ormuzd-Ahriman dualism already expressed in the first canto of "Laon and Cythna"; but, instead of being represented on the theatre of human life, the strife is now removed into the reign of abstractions, vivified by mythopoetry. Prometheus ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... and "lying." They were seldom or never called by distinct names. No account was given of their creation, nor of the origin of their wickedness. No single superior intelligence, no great Principle of Evil, was placed at their head. Ahriman (Angro-mainyus) does not occur in the Gathas as a proper name. Far less is there any graduated hierarchy of evil, surrounding a Prince of Darkness, with a sort of court, antagonistic to the angelic host of Ormazd, as ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... They held, with Pythagoras, the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. They believed, indeed, in duplicate souls. They believed with Zoroaster, in the two great creative and antagonistical principles of Ormusd and Ahriman, and they had THEN, and have STILL, an influential and powerful order of priests, who uphold the principles ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... you for the birds of Ahriman, who is not beautiful but is Evil. Henceforth ye shall be black as night, and ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... from the East. A writer the reverse of credulous expresses himself thus on that subject: 'We know that the Scandinavians came from some country of Asia.... This doctrine was in many respects the same with that of the Magi. Zoroaster had taught that the conflict between Ormuzd and Ahriman (i.e. light and darkness, the Good and Evil Principle) should continue to the last day; and that then the Good Principle should be reunited to the Supreme God, from whom it had first issued; the Evil should be overcome and subdued; ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... with this evolution is the great enthroning of love in the thirteenth century: it means the replacing of the terror of a divinity, who was little better than a metaphysical Moloch (sometimes, and oftener than we think, a metaphysical Ormuzd and Ahriman of Manichean character), by the idolatry of an all-gracious Virgin, of an ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... dreamed that it was created on this wise. Ahriman, having long been defeated in his evil purposes by Ormuzd, fled away secretly to a distant part of the world, and there in silence made a land which should be utterly his own. He brought together every element ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... Zoroaster we must worship Mithra (the sun), from whom descend Ormuzd, the god of good, and Ahriman, the god of evil. The world will end when Ormuzd has triumphed over his rival, Ahriman, who will then return ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... him Ahriman, the Hindus called him Siva. He was represented on canvas as a mythological combination of Thor and Cerberus and Pan and Vulcan and other horrible addenda. I do not care what you call him, that monster ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... evil, on the contrary, is non-existence (akem), and in the oldest parts of the Avesta, the Gathas, which go back to Zarathustra and his first followers, is not yet conceived as a personal being. First in the Vendidad, written after Zarathustra, does Angro-mainyus (Ahriman), or the evil one, with his Dews, although subordinated to Ahura-Mazda, gain a place in the Iranian conception of the universe, as the adversary of Ahura-Mazda, and as the cause of evil in the natural and spiritual world. From these conceptions there was developed ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... created fire and water. From these Ormusd (Auramazda), the good spirit, took his origin. He was brilliant as the light, pure and good. After having, in the course of 12000 years, created heaven, paradise and the stars, he became aware of the existence of an evil spirit, Ahriman (Angramainjus), black, unclean, malicious and emitting an evil odor. Ormusd determined on his destruction, and a fierce strife began, in which Ormusd was the victor, and the evil spirit lay 3000 years ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... waste, to till the land, to make a corner of the earth better than they found it, was to these men to rescue a bit of Ormuzd's world out of the usurped dominion of Ahriman; to rescue it from the spirit of evil and disorder for its rightful owner, the Spirit of Order and ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Satan, a quasi-independent being hostile to the Supreme Deity.[1793] Christianity, adopting this conception from Judaism, elaborated it into the person of the Devil, the veritable head of a kingdom of evil, called in the New Testament "the god of this age."[1794] Though doomed to final defeat, as Ahriman in the Avesta is doomed, the Devil in the orthodox Christian system is practically omnipresent and is powerful enough to defeat the plans of God in many cases. In modern enlightened Christian feeling, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... truth can stand in hopeless antagonism to any other truth. To suppose otherwise would be to resolve the moral government of God into a hopeless enigma, or enthrone a perpetual and hostile dualism, resigning the universe to the rival and contending sway of Ormuzd and Ahriman. ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... in which the founder dealt, into persons, and arranging them after the pattern of Oriental society. In the later Yasnas (liturgies) a figure rises into view which the Gathas do not mention; that of Angra Mainyu, later Ahriman, the Bad Spirit. In this counterpart of Spenta Mainyu, the Good Spirit (who is not at first identified with Ahura, but proceeds from him), the demons obtain a personal head, and the dualism which appears in all nature and all ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies |
